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Has the Internet “hamsterized” journalism?

A new FCC report on media suggests that the modern online newsroom has become …

Hey there newspaper reporter—has your broadband-powered job got you filing not only conventional stories, but blogging, video blogging, Facebooking, podcasting, picture posting, and Tweeting? If so, you'll be happy to know that the Federal Communications Commission earned its keep this week by coming up with a term for this ever growing set of digital duties: the "hamsterization" of American journalism.

"As newsrooms have shrunk, the job of the remaining reporters has changed. They typically face rolling deadlines as they post to their newspaper's website before, and after, writing print stories," the FCC notes in its just released report on The Information Needs of Communities.

Motion for motion's sake

The good news about this online convergence, the survey observes, is that it allows print journalists to produce short and longer versions of stories, the web versions of which can be continuously updated as the situation develops.

But, "these additional responsibilities—and having to learn the new technologies to execute them—are time-consuming, and come at a cost. In many newsrooms, old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting—the kind where a reporter goes into the streets and talks to people or probes a government official—has been sometimes replaced by Internet searches."

Thus, those "rolling deadlines" in many newsrooms are increasingly resembling the rapid iteration of the proverbial exercise device invented for the aforementioned cute domestic rodent. The observation was first made by Dean Starkman in a Columbia Journalism Review piece titled "The Hamster Wheel."

The "Hamster Wheel" isn't about speed, the report quotes Starkman as saying. "It's motion for motion's sake... volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no."

Journalists complain that where newsrooms used to reward in-depth stories, "now incentives skew toward work that can be turned around quickly and generate a bump in Web traffic."

"None of this is written down anywhere, but it's real," Starkman contends. "The Hamster Wheel, then, is investigations you will never see, good work left undone, public service not performed."

Bureaucratize the phrase

These observations impressed the team leader of the FCC document, journalist Steven Waldman. "Since I now work at the Federal government, I decided to bureaucratize the phrase a little bit," Waldman told the FCC at Friday's Open Commission meeting, where the report was unveiled. "And we are now referring to this as 'hamsterization'."

It isn't likely that the Commission is actually going to do anything about this reporters-as-hamsters problem. The FCC, it should be remembered, has statutory authority over newspapers only to the extent that their owners try to buy radio or television stations. So most of the recommendations focus on TV and radio signal regulatory reform.

But the document does wonder about any further deregulation of the government's always controversial newspaper/TV-radio station cross ownership rules, which the FCC voted to loosen in 2007. The latest rules make it easier for entities to own newspapers and TV stations in the top 20 Nielsen Designated Market Areas of the US. But they are being challenged in court, and the Commission is currently reevaluating the provisions, as it must all of its media ownership caps every four years.

"It is easy to see how newspapers and TV stations merging operations could lead to efficiencies and improved business models that might result in more reporting resources and therefore help reach the policy goal of enhanced 'localism'," the report observes.

On the other hand, it is also easy to see how such mergers could simply improve the bottom line of a combined company without actually increasing the resources devoted to local newsgathering in a community. Therefore, we are not persuaded that relaxing ownership rules would inevitably lead to more local news, information or reporting or that it would inevitably lead to less.

The Commission should also "consider looking at shared services agreements with the same question in mind—whether the arrangements contribute to the overall media health of the community," the survey's recommendations in this area conclude.

Matthew Lasar
Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Emailmatthew.lasar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@matthewlasar

45 Reader Comments

Good article; you can see the hamsterization effect on all these "major" news sites that completely misspell headline words or misstate facts in an attempt to be the first to report a particular story.

I think a real problem here is the almost total loss of local reporting in DMAs 21 and beyond. Pick up a newspaper in one of these communities and see what percentage of the articles are straight from the wire.

But, "these additional responsibilities—and having to learn the new technologies to execute them—are time-consuming, and come at a cost. In many newsrooms, old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting—the kind where a reporter goes into the streets and talks to people or probes a government official—has been sometimes replaced by Internet searches."

Pfffft, Bull.

The mythical 'shoe-leather' journalism is long gone. Starting with the Clinton Presidency, journalist have gone off their rockers. 'He said, she said" articles equating scientists with idiots, evolution with creationism, AGW with climate denialists, 'the Earth is round' with Flat-Earthers. Reporting that 'Some say' when the only ones saying that are the voices whispering in their ears. Supporting anonymous sources that repeat the current CW, while decrying whistle-blowers. Where is the journalism?

Reality has a liberal bias, People. Tweets, Blogs, and Internet Searches ain't the problem. Repeating that 'Pi equals 3' or whatever the 'Cool Kidz' inside the Beltway say in order to be invited to their cocktail weenie parties is the problem.

Reporting now is more reporting the controversies than informing he public. It is lazy and easy, there has always been politic in reporting but with he relaxing of ownership rules, it has allowed organizations more and more influence on our public discourse and policy which is bad.

the Federal Communications Commission earned its keep this week by coming up with a term for this ever growing set of digital duties: the "hamsterization" of American journalism.

The FCC may have coined the term, but it's long overdue. One of the more egregious moments for me being the suit against a Florida Fox station. Whom, along with Monsanto attempted to coerce two hired investigative reporters to present knowingly false and deceptive information from Monsanto to negate controversy with Bovine Growth Hormone in the cattle and dairy industries (doesn't that beat all, when we do get good investigative reporters, they're censored by their own news agencies).

Sadly, after an initially sane judgment, we got the later nonsense from the appellate side that the journalists were not covered by whistleblowers laws/protection as the new agencies abiding by FCC legislation that isn't actual law.

The stuff touched on in this article is really just a flash in the pan when you look at where investigative journalism and integrity are headed when there's profit to be had for petty "hamsterized" reporting or even outright lying. That's ignoring the increasing loss of real local reporting. When I say local reporting, I mean more than a blurb about stinky Bob taking a bath for the first time in 8 months. Worse is that the more spread out the community, the greater the effects of the loss of local programming and news within those communities.

Well before Internet media began seriously challenging the economic viability of traditional journalism, there was a serious problem of journalists rushing stories to press that were simply rehashed press releases. This reached a crisis point with the invasion of Afghanistan, when most media outlets were uncritically repeating the White House talking points. The traditional media's loss of credibility preceded the explosion of alternative media.

Good article; you can see the hamsterization effect on all these "major" news sites that completely misspell headline words or misstate facts in an attempt to be the first to report a particular story.

There is a lot of good journalism going on out there despite the lack of copy editors and the expanded duties of reporters. I can see that all those extra duties limit the time a reporter could spend on stories but it makes the news more accessible to more people. There are so many excellent news outlets (e.g. NPR, AP, Reuters), news aggregators (e.g. Google News, The Daily Beast), and news summary sites (e.g. 24in60.com) that its easy for people to control how engaged they want to be with the news.

The New York Times tweeted “Up to 30 Dismembered Bodies Found Near Houston, Reuters Reports.” CNN covered the story. ABC News tweeted it. Several other news organizations piled on to make the gruesome story international news. One problem: the story wasn’t true. Bigger problem: it was really really not true - it was all based on a tip from a psychic. Bob looks into how this crazy media frenzy went down.

The FCC's credentials to evaluate the quality of journalism are dubious at best. Anyone who imagines some fantasy of journalistic wonder in the past should go back and spend time reading the newspapers of the 1950's and early 1960's. Even in newspapers like the New York times, the typical content of reporting on subjects of minor importance like the emerging war in Vietnam mainly consisted of repeating the handouts from Pentagon briefings. I doubt that you would be able to find any science reporting that could challenge the quality Ars manages. There is certainly a large quantity of low quality information on the web. But, there is also a significant amount of high quality discussion. You certainly would not find the quality of economics discussion you can hear on CNBC anywhere in the 1960's media. With all of its imperfections the level of quality that Wikipedia manages compares very favorably with the typical standards of the academic world. Of course, there are no standards for the FCC. So there is no real surprise at this kind of self serving hot air.

These activities have nothing to do with journalism, but rather are merely euphemisms for the same, tired word: editorializing. The fault most certainly does not lie with the "new media"--new media is merely an accentuated view of the extant flaws of the traditional media. The Internet simply magnifies and greatly enhances the biases and prejudices of the traditional media of yesteryear. Television media personalities like Dan Rather, for instance (and he is certainly not an isolated case), did in recent years, as their traditional reputations and outreaches began to shrink and wither as a result of the new-media saturation (Internet, et al), begin to wax emotional, if not hysterical, inside their supposed "cool and objective" roles as news personalities far too professional to ever allow themselves to be caught up in such an unseemly, unprofessional, emotional fray.

I can still see Dan Rather on the CBS evening news, after reciting some figures showing the Democrats in recession at the polls versus the Republicans nationally, saying with a poker face that he--that is "he" as in "Dan Rather"--wanted to know where the *anger* was about these issues! Rather at that point had at long last tipped over the edge and allowed his emotional preferences to blind his objectivity as a journalist--and at that point Rather began a rapid decline in influence and importance. It's an old story: newscasters become enamored of their own importance in the scheme of things, and begin to believe that events revolve around themselves, and begin to believe that what they do and say is of paramount historical importance. And so they will lie and exaggerate under the auspices of this conviction, and believe that everything they say and allege is quite proper, since, "Nothing less than the future of the Republic is at stake," or some other, similar dramatic rationalization that has them standing alone at the center of an unrequited universe, the lone and tragic arbiter of All Truth.

Next to Olbermann, of course, as in Keith Olbermann, the narcissistic machinations of Dan Rather were as nothing.... Olbermann is, for me, the epitome of the modern journalist who is narcissistic to the degree that the objective facts in any matter are of far less importance than Olbermann's opinions.

I've been observing the affects of these conditions for some time now. It shows in the lack of reflection and context in many news and other articles. There was a time when the Times wouldn't publish something until they had time to really check facts, reflect on the meaning of the story, and to place it in its proper context. Sadly, this is sometimes no longer the case.

Also, web-only news sources seem mostly to have taken there cues from populist newspapers and television rather than the quality press. One often sees this with sensationalist headlines, lack of context, poor fact checking, and an inability to properly moderate comments (which shouldn't be allowed in news stories unless they are properly monitored).

Journalism doesn't exist anymore. I can even count how many times I've read an article on this site where someone made a correction to the story in the comments section.

So before comments sections existed, you think mistakes didn't exist just because they weren't pointed out?

People like to blame the media for misleading headlines and shoddy reporting, but even on Ars, only the most sensationalized stories get any comments. Why spend years researching and writing a news story on the history of bean growing when it will only get a few reads, when you can pop out a story about Sony getting hacked for the 20th time and get millions?

The "always on" nature of the Internet, means that news organisations now feel the need to provide news everywhere, all the time. This means that the desire to be first has now trumped the desire to be right. Once some inefficiencies are ironed out, the trade-off between speed and quality becomes unavailable.

As a result, it becomes a question of demand from us, the audience. I have started hearing with increasing frequency statements along the lines of "why would I want to read yesterday's news in the paper when I can get online accounts of events as they happen?" If that is your preference then it is your preference – you are not wrong, but do not be surprised at the shoddy quality of reporting. People need time to reflect in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. This is why media produced on a delayed basis weekly (e.g. The Economist) or monthly (e.g. Prospect Magazine) can be an incredibly powerful source of calm, reasoned analysis, and one which demonstrates that many of the stories that initially seemed so important were actually inconsequential.

To reiterate again, however, it is a tradeoff – wait too long to hear about something and you might miss the best time to respond to it. Although, how many of us actually have any desire, need, or capability to actually respond to the news? How were our lives enriched by Balloon Boy?

Come on, journalism hasn't been journalism since the TV networks turned it into their own propaganda machines to put forward their views and to make up stories when it is a slow news day. I don't trust the TV networks as a source. I don't trust any source until I can find other sources with the same information.

More *real* news gets out on the internet now and in the public eye then ever in the history of humanity and that includes all those years the FCC had control over its lackeys in the newsroom. We don't need you FCC, take a hike, you just want to spread your tentacles of control and homogenization of what you want to be news over the internet like you did to the TV.

As for me, Unless I read/hear/see a story from at least 3 sources taken from differing points of view, I consider the subject in question complete fiction. Unless it's analysis - that's subjective by nature so is excusable to a degree.

Well before Internet media began seriously challenging the economic viability of traditional journalism, there was a serious problem of journalists rushing stories to press that were simply rehashed press releases. This reached a crisis point with the invasion of Afghanistan, when most media outlets were uncritically repeating the White House talking points. The traditional media's loss of credibility preceded the explosion of alternative media.

Well said.

I do think that part of the media's credibility problem comes from the fact that the internet allows people to check up on the 'facts' being spread by 'mainstream' news agencies. And what they find is the stories are mostly speculation and sensationalism, with a few facts sprinkled around to give the appearance of real information. Then people log onto Twitter or Facebook, and get the story directly from witnesses or even people involved directly in the events.

But, "these additional responsibilities—and having to learn the new technologies to execute them—are time-consuming, and come at a cost. In many newsrooms, old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting—the kind where a reporter goes into the streets and talks to people or probes a government official—has been sometimes replaced by Internet searches."

...and what do they get when searching? Someone has to write the data they find, it doesn't just automagically appear.

The new rooms can adapt and move on. I don't know why people focus on change as a negative view. The technology enables so many more ways to communicate; they need to take advantage of this and adapt instead of crying about the past.

If you want to bitch about news for the sake of just spamming news, look at all the complete bullshit that comes from Fox News (the highest inaccuracies of any media outlet), MSNBC, CNN, etc...

Yeah this is getting ridiculous. I mean, back in the day, before Ars went all digital, the classic MacOS reviews were epic. The MacOS X ones published online are a mere shadow of those at only 23 pages or so.

There's real journalism out there. There's journalism and there's "media". I would put something like ProPublica.org in the journalism camp. Though with this crowd on this thread, I doubt even that would satisfy even them.

For *some* news organizations, this is all they have left anymore. Some groups out there are still doing real, valid journalism. I've worked before with people that have done 'real' journalism. Here's what this *really* means:

Newspapers and to an extent radio and TV networks no longer need journalists deployed in non-local locations. It used to be that they all maintained someone in major areas: DC, New York, London, California, etc. The internet has made the world smaller now, so now instead of looking at your local paper or alphabet soup affiliate for political news, you can just go online and look at Politico. The redundancy is gone, and virtually every news outlet except the 'majors' have had non-local news essentially torn from their domain.

A few years ago, I worked for a company that was owned by a major print news outlet. At the annual meeting, the president of the organization outright admitted that only the tabloid (not meaning Enquirer etc) format saw any growth. And that is the format of blurbs, of summarization, of sensationalism. Ergo how everyone knows about the crazy lady that killed her kid, but are ignorant of the people dying in civil unrest and war. And yes, this model is most effective when the volume is high.

I don't think the internet has hamsterized journalism any more than the 24x7 TV news has. If anything, it makes it easier to link viewers towards the most comprehensive, definitive coverage of an event (which would tend to be the local major news outlet). And maybe expound upon local impact if warranted.

People might leave TV news on in the background, so of course it's going to be "packed" with filler to keep people from changing the channel. And while people who read news from the internet might frequent a few sites and perhaps read the same story from a couple aggregators, the point is to try to read the authoritative account of some event maybe once.

"'As newsrooms have shrunk, the job of the remaining reporters has changed. They typically face rolling deadlines as they post to their newspaper's website before, and after, writing print stories,' the FCC notes in its just released report on The Information Needs of Communities."

"They typically face rolling deadlines." Somehow, I think there's a word missing, but what caught my eye is face rolling. The FCC said, "face rolling?" Really? Did they add after that, "Inorite? Journalism has become a mix of complete and utter fail, QQ moar and L2P. Btw, all your base are belong to us." When did the FCC get overrun by WoW players?

I'm glad to see the folks here at Ars keep trying to stay off this trend. Their reports are more often far deeper in depth and far tighter in accuracy than any of the other blogs and certainly the Alphabets. There's clearly a culture of care about the quality of the reporting here, something I'd like to see some FCC "encouragement" about focus on other agencies. I'm not saying regulate media, but when sources are cross quoted they need to be better declared, when "facts" are published that turn out to have gone completely un-researched and wrong there should be some penalties. When you repost someone else's news, and call yourself a news agency, there should be at least a moderate requirement to fact check the story, some base cost in time and resources, before you can post it to stop this churn of rapid refirings that get further and further from the real story and/or lack key details leading to honest mis-representation of truth (or lack completely of it).

Well, it all boils down to the question: Are news organizations charities or businesses? I suspect we like to think that it should be the former, but in practice it is often the latter.

If your bottom line is to get page hits and/or ad views, then it is not surprising that news organizations slide towards sensationalism. If your remit is accuracy, sensationalism is much less rewarding. Fox News and PBS are good examples of these opposites. Most other news organizations are somewhere in between. I am not sure the Internet has much to do with this, other than being another means to serve ads/get the news out there.

Oh my...the masses are in an uproar..."Yellow Journalism is Yellow!" they cry...the facts aren't being reported?

Of course they are not. Look at who their advertisers are and look at who should be in the spotlight for questionable dealings, lies, misinformation to the public, violations of safety, disregard for local state and federal laws.

They happen to be one in the same. Big business has been inserted into politics and the media for a long time. They control much of what you see and hear on TV, radio and even Internet news publications. They also control what their (oops) your "representatives" vote on and what is brought up to be voted on.

They manipulate the market and call it stimulus. They alter our taxes and call it redistribution. They alter what we are allowed to know and call it education.

They manipulate us into altering what we do, when we do it, how we do it, where we go and what we talk about.

Perhaps the world isn't that deep after all. "In depth" reporting was always sensational, melodramatic tripe. The kind that led to Dan Rather casting innocent Vietnam vets as psychotics.

60-minutes was the worst. Does anyone still defend ambush journalism? Everyone is going to look guilty or foolish when you approach them that way. It's just rude... their reporters were like paparazzi, except they used crusty old men dressed in suits, as if that makes them credible.

Insert carefully placed moments of silence into the program, making emotional viewers feel things they needn't, and you have the essence of Old Media. Good riddance to it.

Well, it all boils down to the question: Are news organizations charities or businesses? I suspect we like to think that it should be the former, but in practice it is often the latter.

I think that this is only a side-issue. It's clear that good journalism at the local, regional/state, national, and international levels allows people to live better lives, and improves all sorts of social processes (e.g. elections). Since the economic pressures on journalism are fairly obvious, and since the effects of technology on the economics of journalism are becoming clear, the question isn't so much whether we want news to be a charity or a business operation, but how do we encourage quality journalism?

That is, it's obvious that we want quality journalism. The questions are how much it costs, and how can it be paid for?

Good observations here. I think the reason why people don't notice the way technologically enhanced speed is having an adverse effect on quality, is that they have assimilated with it quite well! concentration spans, spelling levels in 'educated' countries are falling, we are becoming 'that' hyperactive child we found exhausting to deal with at school..

[...] it's obvious that we want quality journalism. The questions are how much it costs, and how can it be paid for?

It's not at all obvious to me that the majority of the population want "quality journalism", or that we understand "quality" in the same way that others do (I once talked to a dentist from Texas who maintained that Fox News is the only unbiased news outlet). I think it's all about incentives, and right now a large proportion of the news channels (at least in the US) are incentivized towards sensationalism and extreme political bias.

chimly wrote:

What's the difference between profit and funding? Except that "funding" still happens no matter how inefficient you are?

It's all money, and the publics are corrupted towards whatever system supports them. The for-profits likewise support their way. The hell with all of them.

The difference between for-profit and non-profit is that the money is conditioned in a certain way. For example, the non-profit BBC gets a fixed amount from the tax payer (based on the license fee) and has as specific remit to provide balanced news reporting, among other things. They do not secure the continuation of the license fee by sensationalism, but by providing factual and unbiased news coverage. And it does not pander to the government at all. If anything, the opposite is true.

[...] it's obvious that we want quality journalism. The questions are how much it costs, and how can it be paid for?

It's not at all obvious to me that the majority of the population want "quality journalism", or that we understand "quality" in the same way that others do (I once talked to a dentist from Texas who maintained that Fox News is the only unbiased news outlet). I think it's all about incentives, and right now a large proportion of the news channels (at least in the US) are incentivized towards sensationalism and extreme political bias.

'We' want quality journalism in the same sense that 'we' want quality government; while it's true that individuals probably mostly don't think about the quality of their journalism, and in that sense don't want quality journalism in any conscious sense, society as a whole, particularly a society with participatory and democratic values, relies on that quality at a fundamental level.

They do not secure the continuation of the license fee by sensationalism, but by providing factual and unbiased news coverage. And it does not pander to the government at all. If anything, the opposite is true.

"Fix amount" means entitlement. "Remits" are meaningless when there is no penalty for mistakes, and no fair way to decide those failings.

About a month ago NPR did a series of programs about how fair they are. Their hosts talked about themselves and that was all, end of story. It was worse propaganda than any state media overseas... only they're all rich and white, meaning "good" in the Western view.